The day before New Year’s, I found myself wondering if there were resolutions I should make. Perhaps I could come up with something simple, promise myself not to go to bed with dishes in the kitchen sink or lights on in the living room. My husband makes sure the pots and pans are scrubbed before he calls it a day, and as a morning person, I am up and at it early the next day to put them away.

With newfound energy, I look forward to the beginning of a nice day — and The New York Times. Even though I know The Times can be read online, I like finding it on the front lawn. With a cup of coffee in hand, I think of it as a comfortable routine. But as I write this, it is the last day of 2018, and The Times is anything but comforting.

The headlines on the front page read: “C.I.A.’s Afghan Forces Leave a Trail of Abuse and Anger,” “Trump Digs In, Dimming Hope of a Budget Deal,” “Stunning Fall of Nissan’s Brash Savior,” “How a PowerPoint Slide Tangled McKinsey in a U.S. Bribery Case,” and “Cultural Shifts Sweep Away a California Bastion of Conservation.” Nothing positive there.

On most mornings, looking for solace, I turn to nature — the birds and houseplants. The birds are satisfying to take care of, and easy. You keep a feeder full of seed and an eye out to identify what they are, although I have to admit I cannot tell one sparrow-like bird from another. A family member who had not lived on the East Coast before marrying and moving here not only knows them all but can distinguish between the males and females. 

All right, to be honest, I can say I know one cardinal from another. The red males brighten the yard and the subtle, tannish-yellow females are beautiful to see. As for the house plants, I enjoy the almost constant fussing they require. No matter how frequently I tend them, though, there is more to do — a dead leaf I missed on a first foray to be removed, for example, and a plant to be turned so the side that warrants more sun gets it.

I think concentrating on these things instead of the news, or the chores and responsibilities that lie ahead, allows for a good morning. The trouble is that each day brings more than mornings. Ideas and events that do not necessarily bode well have a way of intruding. But let’s forget the news. 

I am counting on the Chinese to set things right. The 4,716th Chinese year begins on Feb. 5, and 2019 is said to be the year of the brown or female earth pig. According to the Chinese, a female pig is a portent of good news. I am hoping she makes the new year one of the best.

Empty but for the two of us on the top deck of the Cross Sound Ferry bound for New London on New Year’s Day, my middle child and I watched the waves. Evvy, named after my late father, takes after him in many ways, though they never met. It was her idea to explore the boat, and he, like us, would have been outside on the deck while the rest of the passengers sat quietly inside, away from the wind. Pointing out Gardiner’s Island and the Ruins, I thought about him, the many things he told me about the weather and the bay, but I kept it to myself.

A half-mile off the starboard side of the John H., whitewater was rushing up and down the cobble beach on Plum Island. Evvy asked why the waves were so high. I fumbled an answer, something about the wind reaching across the Sound all the way from New Haven. What makes waves, she asked. The wind, I said.

The truth is that although I believe the wind makes waves, I do not know how it works. The basic elements are obvious enough. A breeze able to be felt on the skin on an otherwise still day ruffles the surface of the water. As the wind rises, so, too, do the ripples become chop. Given enough fetch, the chop becomes waves, the waves become swell. What drives it all is unseen.

As I recall dimly from books, notably Willard Bascom’s seminal “Waves and Beaches,” wind agitates molecules of water. The rapid aggregation of swell, which made the ferry roll sidewise on the first day of the year, is harder to grasp. Remarkable, I think, too, is that swell can travel hundreds or thousands of miles, even passing under a calm surface, like the ripples of a bed sheet being shaken.

Near the Connecticut shore, the motion of the John H. gradually settled. Each wave lifted it slightly less than the one before. Passengers who had been bolt upright leaving Orient Point put down their heads and their phones and dozed. Closer in, getting back into cellular range, phones came out and people began to stir as we pulled into the shelter of the lower Thames. There were ripples on the water as we docked, but not enough to worry the shore on the other side of New London Harbor.

David Brooks wrote the other day about his fear that America might soon become a kakistocracy, and, of course, I had to look the word up. Derived from ancient Greek, it means, our dog-eared Webster’s dictionary tells us, “government by the worst men.”

I had been thinking along the lines of caca, and cacastocracy, and hadn’t, as it turned out, been far off the mark, but for some reason, perhaps because I remain an optimist in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, I tend not to agree with the columnist’s dour outlook for the year 2019.

Trump, he seems to think, when it all comes down, will, like a wounded wild boar (my analogy), run roughshod over everyone, over the Constitution, the rule of law, common decency, all that.

Will there be sages the likes of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson, and Judge John Sirica (he could also have included in that number Sam Ervin, Howard Baker, and Peter Rodino) of Watergate fame to stand up to him, and, in so doing, reassert the equilibrium that our system of checks and balances intends?

Or will we be thrown — a likelihood in his view — to the wolves of party loyalty, ideological fervor, and general calumny?

And yet, and yet. . . . When the chips were down, a fellow East Hamptoner reminded me at a holiday party not long ago, Americans tended in critical moments to put their shoulders to the wheel and to do, in concert, the right thing.

We were talking about countering East Hampton Airport’s pollution (the airport itself being a Depression-era offspring of that can-do spirit), but his assertion can be applied to the amelioration of any number of ills, whether environmental or societal, that cry for attention.

I am an optimist and I believe him, not the dour David. People of good sense will stand up, sweet reason will win the day, that’s my New Year’s prediction.

Our car has been acting rather erratic, lately, which makes me grateful that it is only a short walking distance between the place I live and the place I work, some 70 or 80 yards. The East Hampton Library abuts my property, as well, making a neat triangle between my front door, the Star office, and the library; it’s also only a hop and skip across Main Street to Guild Hall, the fourth point on my compass. 

I never have to go very far from home to be enlightened.

The temperature had fallen below 20 degrees on Monday when I set out to return a book to the library, and the big question was whether The Star office’s driveway-side door was closer to the library’s front or back door. 

These are the calculations of a senior citizen in winter.

A few months ago, the library installed a handy-dandy beverage machine that grinds and brews a choice of Starbucks coffees, as well as chai and cocoa, which cost only $1 if you take your own mug or $2 if you take a paper cup, and the lure of the coffee machine brought me to the front door of the library. Because it was so cold, I opted for hot chocolate. Continuing my cold-avoidance maneuvers, I walked through the stacks and out the library’s back door to minimize the number of steps back to my desk.

These are the simple pleasures of a senior citizen in winter.

I love going to the library, and very much enjoy its architectural elegance. How lucky we are to have such a well-run and well-supplied institution at the heart of our village.

Being there also gives me an opportunity to glance at a portrait of my late mother-in-law, Jeannette Edwards Rattray, which hangs near the reference desk. As a member of its board of managers, as well as a neighbor, she was a force in the library’s evolution. Indeed, she had grown up in “the Purple House,” which stood between the library and the Star office, where the north wing of the library was constructed in the 1970s. She, like me, made frequent triangular trips between the compass points of home, work, and enlightenment.

The “East Hampton Free Library” had its beginnings at Clinton Academy at the turn of the last century and moved slightly south, nearer Buell Lane, in 1912. Its driving force was a group of 12 local women; its first librarian was Ettie Cartwright Hedges. Interestingly, it was another determined woman, Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse, who donated the land as well as the money to construct the original part of the pretty building, which was meant to look like a timber-frame house in a village in Kent, England, where East Hampton’s original settlers were said to have come from. 

Guild Hall and the John Drew Theater, as well as the Nature Trail, were also gifts to the community from Mary Lorenzo Woodhouse and her husband, Lorenzo.

Last Saturday, I was among the crowd gathered at Guild Hall for a Metropolitan Opera screening of “Adriana Le­couvreur,” starring the marvelous diva Anna Netrebko, and had time to think about the enduring bounty of these Woodhouse gifts. 

What sort of village would we be, without Guild Hall, the library, and the Nature Trail? I know my own everyday life would be much diminished, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

“We’re going to be in for some snow, O’en,” Mary said as we were driving along last Wednesday, before realizing she’d mistaken me for the dog, a good sign.

That she would think to compare me, a Mr. Burns look-alike (in fact, I can rub my hands, and, with a protruding fang, say, “Excellent, excellent” just as he), with such a dignified, snowy-coated beast was comforting, especially in weather that is becoming anything but.

I still worry every now and then, as does she, that we are a bit boring as masters, too old to trot along with him, at least in my case, and too eager to pull the sliding glass door shut when he’s still wanting to chase tennis balls in the frigid gloaming. 

As a ball-chaser he is mercurial. He’ll do it for a while, if he’s pretty sure there’s a treat waiting, in which case he’ll follow the commands — “Bring it . . . Front . . . Sit.” But eventually he’ll get distracted, by a stick, the scent of a mole, or some such, affording us the chance to duck back inside to warm our hands.

It would be nice to go some place warm, I guess, for the winter months, but the warmer the place, it seems, the more off-putting the political climate. Maybe somebody will invent something you can spray on, to protect you from nativist spleen. Of course, to be fair, there should be lotion Trumpians could apply, too, lest they be irradiated by World Federalists. That having been said, as they say, I found that people were quite friendly when we were in Naples a few years ago, probably because most of the other vacationers we met were from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Canada, where from time to time we say we should move to, if it weren’t so cold, which serves to underline the point I made above. Cold place, warm hearts. Warm place, old farts.

Temperate place, warm hearts and old farts, I guess, which is why we’re still here, engaged in the eternal round of despair and hope, small town contention and amiability. Come to think of it, despair and hope pretty much dominated the conversation at the media forum in Sag Harbor that we went to today. There were challenges to be sure, not the least of which was posed by the perplexing half-done crossword puzzle I’d taken with me, but there was hope too that local news, offered in varying formats, through print, websites, podcasts, and local access television, would remain germane, a future that seemed assured when I arose from the American Hotel table an hour or so later with the puzzle finished in its entirety, usually a sign of good things to come, even if it looked as if we were going to be in for some snow.

Root canals need rebranding. I was thinking about this while sitting in a dentist’s chair earlier this week with all manner of devices in my maw, staring at the ceiling.

Going into the day’s excitement, I had told people around the office where I was going to be. To a person, at the words “root canal,” they shuddered or cringed in empathetic fear. 

Though I had undergone the procedure previously, about two years ago on a different molar, I remembered next to nothing, having been entirely whacked-out on laughing gas. At the time, I was worried and agreed when offered the hose end — self-regulated like a hookah. What did I know? I huffed and puffed and pretty soon I was high as a Georgia pie. (Those of you who know the reference will get what I mean.) 

All I can recall from root canal numero uno is that it seemed the same Tom Petty song was playing in the room as I took my first deep inhalation and an hour later, when someone charitably dialed the oxygen ratio back up, and I slowly climbed out of the very deep, black pit in which I had been for the preceding hour. I left my car in the dentist’s parking lot and walked, stumbled really, back to The Star. A week later, I still felt as if I had a hole in my head.

Lucid this time around, the root canal was hardly anything. A little Novocain here or there, maybe 45 minutes of drilling and poking around, and the job was done, hardly worthy of as scary a name as root — dah, dum, dum — canal.

Years ago, one of the New Yorker cartoonists drew a knee-slapper of a page poking fun at the restaurant industry’s effort to rename fish. I don’t remember much other than the concept and the “before” moniker of a made-up fish — the greasy-mouthed bleb. I know, sounds delicious right?

“Greasy-mouthed bleb” has for me become a kind of stand-in for renaming something unappealing to sound a little more appetizing. But though I have thought about this a long time (but actually not so hard), I haven’t come up with much, having learned from the technician exactly what the procedure involves. 

English is full of euphemisms. Panicked house-saving is called “dune restoration.” People don’t die anymore, they “pass.” But root canal? All I have come up with so far is “wallet whacker.”

I don’t remember when or why I picked up a small plastic bottle of anise seed at Mitad del Mundo on North Main Street. I was glad it was in a kitchen cabinet the other evening, when I decided to try my hand at making biscotti.

Jane Bimson, who works in The Star’s front office and who I like to talk with about all things cooking, chided me gently on Monday when I raved about how easy it was. “You’re 55, and you are just now finding out!” she said, as she made a note to bake some biscotti for herself very soon.

Jane is a master in the kitchen. Her sweet pickles brighten our Decembers every year, when she hands out a jar for each person at The Star. I am told Baylis Greene quietly consumes every last slice before the day is out. At birthdays, she always makes carrot cake muffins with cream cheese frosting, leaving them on the office kitchen table to honor the person whose lucky day it is. Because I can’t have dairy products, Jane places a single topping-free muffin on my desk before I get in.

We are an office filled with foodies. Russell Bennett’s wife, Fiona, is a test chef and often sends him in with the most remarkable of treats. Matt Charron’s eats are consistently healthy, and we often talk about that. Jennifer Landes knows all about the restaurants. Laura Donnelly (who does not come into the office often enough) and I could talk for hours about scallops and beach plums. My sister, Bess, who works downstairs on East magazine, is a whiz with desserts and has a massive stash of antique cookbooks.

Kathy Kovach, who used to work here, and Carissa Katz, the manag ing editor, worked in catering on the side for years. I spent several summers selling fish at Claws on Wheels in East Hampton, getting to know the regular customers and making up names for some of them, my favorite the “Pounda Flounda Guy.” Leigh Goodstein, a former reporter, manages the Clam Bar on Napeague. I could go on.

There is a thing, I think, about food and the news business, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. Years ago at a wedding, I met a woman who worked in human resources at The Times who told me they put internship résumés in two piles: those with food service experience and those without. They called in the food service people for interviews. I can see why.

And there, for the second week in a row, was another word I didn’t know in a Times column —  midichlorian. It was in Maureen Dowd’s piece about saucy dancing women come to take over the government.

It wasn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary at home, it wasn’t even in the online dictionary that Irene said would save me any more trips to our spine split, dog-eared Webster’s at the edge of Jamie’s desk.

But Mary found it, through Google, the modern equivalent of the Delphic oracle. It’s of “Star Wars” coinage and refers to cells within us that link us to The Force. She liked that idea. We are, then, all one, she said. It would be nice if we were all Obi-Wan too, but alas. Obama’s midichlorian count made Republicans tremble, Maureen Dowd said, until he disarmed them with his professorial side.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s midi­chlorian count has made them tremble too. Not only does she dance, but she thinks the top marginal income tax rate, now at 35 percent, ought to be doubled. Actually, it’s not such a radical idea. That rate was as high as 90 percent in the 1950s, when bottles of milk and clean diapers were delivered to the door, when one wage earner per household largely assured a pleasant life, and when personal incentive remained undampened as far as I know. Google says the top marginal rate even reached 94 percent during World War II.

Given the fact that we’ve been making war on the installment plan for the better part of the past 20 years, it doesn’t seem out of line that the obscenely wealthy who’ve been showered with tax cuts ought to write down the obscene national debt a bit, or at least fortify some bridges. They’re the ones who have been cutting a rug, and have been pulling it out from under the middle class, whose fiscal health is paramount if a democracy is to thrive. So, yes, let’s redress things somewhat. And along that line, I’d like to say that the administration’s assault on SALT (our state and local property tax deductions) is fundamentally a soak the middle class scheme — at least as it concerns many of the half-million Long Island homeowners who itemize — that ought not to stand.  

One wonders what foreigners who hold two-thirds of our national debt might do were they treated by the administration the way those living in New York and California have been. I know, I know, he’s trying.

Warren Buffet has said he owes his wealth, which he intends to give away, essentially to the accident of birth. Ben Franklin said that once one had enough for oneself and one’s family one ought to give the rest back to the country. Teddy Roosevelt in his Progressive Party platform of 1912 advocated for “a single national health service,” inveighed against the unbridled monied interests and unlimited campaign contributions, championed middle-class wage earners, was pro-immigrant, and asserted that “the test of true prosperity shall be the benefits conferred thereby on all the citizens, not confined to individuals or classes.”

“Dismaying,” I can imagine the midichlorian-deprived exclaim as they, like Tolkien’s Gollum, fondle their Rings and whisper, “My precious, my precious.”

A Star headline on Oct. 11 warned, “The Tiny Springs Library Is In Peril.” The report said that the library and the Springs Historical Society, which operates it, were in all sorts of trouble, both organizational and financial. Word spread that the books on the second floor — some 6,000 of them — had had to be thrown away, rather than sold as intended. 

That was all the people of Springs needed to hear to be spurred to action: More than 100 residents rallied at an Oct. 14 meeting at the Presbyterian Church to set things to rights. 

Legal issues are being sorted out pro bono by a resident lawyer. It was announced that an electronic database would be established to document new books as well as the art and children’s books that had been saved, and that new board members, officers, and a secretary had been put in place. 

Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that Springs would not lose its library and that, indeed, the library would be joining the 21st century.

Have you ever been inside the Springs Library? It is the plainly handsome, modest shingled house opposite Ashawagh Hall that once belonged to Ambrose Parsons. It was willed to East Hampton Town by Elizabeth Parker Anderson in 1975, and it is on the state and national registers of historic places. 

Pretty much everything I know about the Springs Library comes to me via the newsletters I have received for years about the various doings there, courtesy of Heather Anderson, who gathered and compiled the information. Ms. Anderson has stepped down after 40 years as president and librarian of the society; it is unclear whether its new officers will decide it is worth the effort and expense to keep the newsletter going.        

For me, the newsletter has been of invariable interest and has provided unimpeachable evidence that community, and history-keeping, are alive and well in Springs. My fingers are crossed that the newsletter will have a future.

The library is staffed entirely by volunteers, and East Hampton Town maintains the building, which is said to be compromised structurally and to need serious attention.

The community is very lucky that the library is sustained by a $5,000 annual grant from the Hilaria and Alec Baldwin Foundation. The Baldwins’ grant has allowed the library to keep its library-card fee a nominal $15 — with a $25 fee for library and society membership — as well as to offer families all the other things (CDs and DVDs and puzzles) we have come to expect in libraries these days. While the library’s new supporters and officers seeks further donations, they have already done a great service for Springs in keeping the library open. Join me in saying, “Hooray!” And perhaps a check might not go amiss?

“Oh yeah, oh yeah / Oh yeah, oh yeah / Imagine. . . .” All the way back in 1963, John Lennon exhorted us to imagine. I’d heard the song — “I’ll Get You,” the B side to “She Loves You” — perhaps a thousand times, but never the way I heard it on Saturday, standing in the subfreezing air with hundreds of others, all of us forming an ever-thickening circle surrounding the mosaic at Strawberry Fields, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. 

Outside of that tiny section of Central Park, people went about their business, that business apparently the holiday-season orgy of materialism or the enthusiastic annihilation of livers and brain cells, Saturday being the annual SantaCon, an event that the late, great Village Voice once described as “a day-long spectacle of public inebriation somewhere between a low-rent Mardi Gras and a drunken fraternity party.” 

Around that mosaic, though, those hundreds, several of them wielding guitars and a handful of other instruments, were remembering Lennon on the 38th anniversary of his murder. The songs flowed, one after the other, one guitarist or another strumming or singing an introduction in an informal, festive sing-along and celebration of Lennon and the Beatles. 

It’s always so nice to see people of all ages and ethnicities come together, forming a sort of microcosmic New York City within the city, a microcosm of humanity itself, in its collective impulses to gather together and express itself. Better still when the expression is uplifting and positive. All you need is love, love is all you need, was Lennon’s message to the world in 1967. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together, he intuited, later that year, with a little help from lysergic acid diethylamide. 

And yet, despite the merry chorus of New Yorkers and visitors to the Capital of the World, where Lennon had persevered, over the strenuous and paranoid protestation of Richard Nixon and his ilk, to become a permanent resident of the city he loved, an overwhelming sadness would not, could not fade away. 

George Harrison, said his widow, Olivia, “was really angry that John didn’t have a chance to leave his body in a better way, because George put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.” 

Lennon was not afforded the luxury of calmly going into the blinding, burning light, mindful that his and the universal mind are one. How could he, with a fan/fanatic squeezing a trigger over and over, shooting holes in his body? 

Nineteen years after Lennon’s murder, the nation was shocked by a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado, two students murdering 12 schoolmates and a teacher. And then, the trickle became a deluge, among the carnage 20 first graders and six adults in Connecticut; 49 killed and 53 wounded inside a nightclub in Orlando, and 58 killed and 851 injured — you read that right — from gunfire and the resulting panic when a gunman opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas. 

This year has been a predictably bloody one in the gun-crazy United States of America. Seventeen more students and teachers were killed, on Valentine’s Day, at a high school in Parkland, Fla. It was the year’s deadliest mass shooting — as of Monday, anyway — but far from the only one. On the 311th day of the year, the 307th mass shooting took place, this time inside a crowded bar in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Twelve were killed — 13 if you count the shooter, who turned the weapon on himself in the end. 

In a sad but sadly foreseeable irony, some of the patrons enjoying country music at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks had survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas one year before. There are now Americans who have personally experienced two mass shootings. 

According to the John Lennon Official account on Instagram, more than 1.4 million people have been killed by guns in the United States since Lennon was shot and killed on Dec. 8, 1980. Is this who we are? Is this who we want to be? Will we passively bury the bodies, offer our eminently useless thoughts and prayers, and await the next shooting, surely knowing by now that nowhere is safe?

Saturday was so very cold in the park, and I left, after an hour, with Lennon’s words rising from the crowd and into the wintry air. “A very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year / Let’s hope it’s a good one, without any fear.” 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.